Needle Dog

Rocket's needle

We’ve been spending the Thanksgiving weekend at Kelly’s parents’ home in Virginia. Yesterday, the kids were helping string popcorn in the kitchen. Rocket took advantage of an opportunity to eat a piece of popcorn and swallowed the needle that was threaded through it. Everyone watched helplessly as the thread disappeared down our dumb dog’s throat.

We loaded him up in the car and headed to the Swansons’ vet in Haymarket. After Rocket got an x-ray, we were told that there were two options to remove the needle: surgery or an endoscopy. Estimated cost was $3000. Ouch! We couldn’t get the endoscopy done there; it could only be done in Leesburg at The LifeCenter. So, I loaded the dog in the car, said goodbye to Kelly and Linda, and drove 30 miles to Leesburg.

The vet there gave me positive news. There was a good chance the needle would pass without surgery. If we chose to proceed with an endoscopy, it might run from $1200 to $1800. After talking it over with Kelly we decided to try the endoscopy.
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Recruiter’s office

I took our dog to the emergency vet in Leesburg yesterday (the topic of another post). The vet’s office just happened to be near the building where I once signed up for the Navy. In the fall of 1987, I walked into the Navy Recruiting office that was upstairs in this building at 26 Plaza Street. It looks like the Marine Corps still has an office there, but no sign of the Navy anymore. Now it’s the home of a tattoo parlor called Insane Ink.

It made me smile to see the building again.

Home break-in averted!

No sooner had I put the finishing touches on my Asterisk alarm script that it got put to use on a real break-in attempt! I stared in disbelief when an actual alarm message came in, thinking that perhaps it was a test message that had only now gotten delivered. When I saw that the alarm type wasn’t one I was using to test my script, I called RPD dispatchers. I then scrambled to find my neighbors’ phone numbers to confirm what was happening.

The break-in attempt was unsuccessful as the alarm sounded as soon as the guy pried open the window. He fled, but not before two of my neighbors caught a glimpse of him. Police arrived, searched the house, and determined that no one had been inside. They secured the window and rearmed the system. My neighbors have since offered to secure the window themselves.

The funny thing is that I was literally testing the system at 10 AM this morning. When the real alarm came in, Kelly called me right after our alarm called.

“How many times today is our house going to be broken into?,” she asked, jokingly.

“Uh, honey? That was a real alarm.”

The police have plenty of clues about the perpetrator. He’s a white guy with a similar build as me, who was riding a bike and wearing a bike helmet. He took off but I would guess that it won’t be long before he’s apprehended.

I’m glad I found out about it five seconds after it happened!

Update 27 Nov: At least six other homes in the area were broken into or attempted yesterday. At one home, the intruder actually took a moment to cook himself some waffles, topping them off with honey. I’m really not sure what that says about the burglar.

Asterisk alarm script fixed

After getting another annoying 3:50 AM wakeup call from my Asterisk alarm monitoring script yesterday, I fixed my script once and for all. I customized the script first created by Uros Indihar, adding the zone assignments that were made on our system, among other things.

Now my Asterisk system only sends alerts for actual alarms and not test messages, unlike my previous script (those test calls get made at 3:50 AM on the fourth Thursday of each month). I can also parse the zone information, letting me know exactly what sensor on the system tripped.

I’ll fix my script up a little more before posting it.

Gerry lives on through his gift of lungs

My late friend Gerry was an organ donor at the time he died in a car wreck. Through the gift of his organs and tissue he gave four people he never met new life.

His wife Mandy and their families got a chance to meet one donor recipient earlier this month: the recipient of Gerry’s lungs. UNC Health Care created a profound video and story of the meeting, showing how Gerry’s gift changed the recipient’s life. Watching Gerr’y’s mom Pat as she listened to Gerry’s lungs brought tears to my eyes.

What an amazing gift of life from an amazingly generous friend.

News media latches on to smoking in parks issue

I’ve always wondered why the news media constantly fails to cover the happenings of Raleigh’s parks department and its board. Parks is a huge city department and Raleigh’s abundant parks are enjoyed by so many citizens that it’s easy to assume that a reporter would be present at the board meetings. Such is not the case. In the two years I’ve been on the board, the only reporter I’ve seen at a meeting is the Independent Weekly’s Bob Geary, who was there when the board discussed the Honeycutt Creek greenway route.
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Smoking in parks

My ire for littering is well-known. It annoys me to no end that some smokers think the world is their ashtray. Anytime I see some careless bastard tossing a cigarette out their window, I send their license plate number to the NCDOT’s Swat-A-Litterbug page, resulting in a nastygram being mailed to them from the highway patrol. I’d venture to guess I’m one of their top litter reporters.
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Back from Iowa

I’m back from Iowa now, three hours early thanks to not taking the airline’s word about there not being any earlier flights. The baggage check employee in Cedar Rapids swore up and down that I couldn’t get into Raleigh from Chicago any earlier than I already was, so I spent almost two hours at the Cedar Rapids airport, waiting for my original flight though I could’ve easily gotten on one leaving early. When I arrived in Chicago, I saw I had a one hour gap until the next flight to Raleigh, so rather than spend three hours at O’Hare I snagged a seat on the earlier flight.

And what a difference it makes to be home. Iowa was extraordinarily windy and bitterly cold. The temperature didn’t crack 30 degrees F the whole time I was there today. Yet when I stepped off the plane at RDU this evening the temperature here was 62 degrees (down from today’s 72 degree high). What a great welcome back, North Carolina!

Time for bed and then tomorrow I return to the airport to pick up my bag, which will spend the night there tonight. More about my Iowa trip later.

Iowa bound

I’m in the Chicago airport on my way to Cedar Rapids, IA. This is a follow-up trip to my last trip, and I hope it’s a formality after what we did two weeks ago. It does provide my first-ever trip to Iowa, however, and I’m looking forward to it for that, among other things.

It was hard leaving the family today, and I dread having to pack for my trips, but I am really loving my job. If I have to make a few trips here and there to make things happen, I’m ok with that. I don’t expect I’ll continue to be this busy. It’s the end of the year and that’s a typically a busy time for sales.

This time I’m flying American Airlines, and RDU is one of the handful of airports that have the new porno-scanners. AA uses Terminal 2, and I don’t recall seeing the porno-scanners in Terminal 1, so there was a possibility I could’ve been scanned. So far I have not been selected to pass through one but I intend to submit to alternative screening (i.e. “fondling”) should I ever get tapped. I think our airport-security bureaucracy has crossed a line of decency with these scanners. Also, as my buddy Ken Thomas pointed out, these machines don’t really make us safer.

This trip, I’ve decided to bring the Nikon along. The business associate I’m meeting is a pretty good photographer and has offered to take me on a quick photo-safari around the area this week. Hauling the camera around is a bit of a pain but I hope it provides me the opportunity to learn a few tricks.

Chaired my first Parks board meeting

Tonight I chaired my first Parks board meeting, one meeting after I was elected Vice Chair. The Chair, Jimmy Thiem, is on vacation this week.

And it was a doozy of a meeting, too, with a controversial action item: a proposal to ban smoking in Raleigh Parks. After some debate and discussion (and lots of work by our Smoking in Parks committee), tonight the Parks board voted unanimously to recommend banning all smoking in city parks.

I received several emails on the topic, all in favor of the ban. I’m sure there are other folks with differing opinions but they were nowhere to be found.
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